discipline-based departments. The University of
Chicago, founded in 1892, opened the first sociology department in the country; its chair, Albion
Small, named “mobility of type” as one among
many “incidents of association” which were
in a constant state of flux and stood at the very
“threshold of sociology itself.” His first textbook,
published in 1894, placed social stratification and
a rising standard of living in that context.

Over the next thirty years,mobility became central to thediscipline’s expert vocabulary.

In 1927, P. A. Sorokin, founder of Harvard’s sociology department, wrote a landmark
book entitled simply Social
Mobility. Sorokin asserted that
just as physical phenomena
are located in geometrical
space, “social space is a kind
of universe composed of the
human population on earth.”
By the 1940s, sociology
textbooks took Sorokin’s cue
and devoted at least a chapter
to stratification which, like
mobility, frames social and
economic fortune in terms of
space and movement.

The iconic idea of the
self-made man also depends
on the analogy of movement
and fortune. Fiction writer
Horatio Alger Jr. was one of
its early proponents. Starting in 1867, Alger published more than 120 novels that are widely known
as rags-to-riches stories. Some titles employed
movement metaphors, such as Risen from the Ranks,
Struggling Upward, Sink or Swim, and Bound to Rise.

Some indicated virtue: Strong and Steady, Slow and
Sure, Strive and Succeed, Try and Trust, Wait and
Hope, Do and Dare. Still others emphasized individuals making the most of equality of condition:

On His Own, Shifting for Himself, Helping Himself.

Mutually reinforcing values coalesce in these titles:
the metaphor of mobility, middle class ideas about
virtue, and rugged individualism. These values are
central to the myth of the self-made man, which
condensed them all in representations of successful social and economic mobility.

The metaphor of “mobility” thus demonstratespatterns of two kinds. First, the term’s historyreveals patterns of meaning over more than threecenturies of liberalism, patterns which elidehuman struggles under conditions which havenot, in fact, been equal. And second, the conceptof movement has itself been a pattern — like apattern for a pair of pants — for how experts,policy makers, and makers of popular culture havefashioned ideas about changes in social and eco-nomic fortune. Historian Dorothy Ross notes thatAmerican social scientists have generally projected“an idealized view of self-propelling individualsand interest groups, imbedded in nature, dynam-ically recreating on American soil a progressive lib-eral society.” The metaphor of mobility has beenan effective tool of this effort.Cultural embrace of this single word has hadlong-term effects. Because it uses shorthand drawnfrom physics to characterize social and economicinequality, it promotes the sense that economicsystems are beyond our control, and that theyare governed by natural law.The word reduces complexexperiences of human struggleto a simple abstraction. Whensociologists made the term atheoretical centerpiece of theirintellectual project, mobilityshaped how concern with formsof human suffering would be ad-dressed. As Ross puts it, “blindto what cannot be measured,[social scientists] are often blindto the human and social conse-quences of their [techniques].” 12Although they did not createthe metaphor of mobility, socialscientists enshrined it as a pat-tern; they normalized and tacitlyendorsed it with the legitimacyof their expertise. Robert Put-nam’s recent book Our Kids: TheAmerican Dream in Crisis (2015)offers a powerful corrective tothe belief that, like a Horatio Al-ger Jr. character, every Americankid can “rise” in social space. Social and economicinequality don’t occur in abstract space, but on theground. The challenge of confronting persistentinequalities will continue without new sharedlanguage to locate them in the real world, and thusexpand the reach of our ethical imaginations.

Nancy Koppelman has been a member of the faculty at
The Evergreen State College for 20 years. She teaches full-time
interdisciplinary learning communities that combine fields in the
humanities, and the humanities with fields of study in other divisions
of knowledge. She has invented more than two dozen of them,
and she consults with colleges and universities who seek to create
interdisciplinary learning communities. She led the Teaching American
History Project in the South Sound region of Washington for four
years. Nancy’s scholarship is about ethical challenges particular to
modernity. She earned her B.A. from Evergreen, her M.A. in history
from the University of Washington, and her Ph.D. in American studies
from Emory University. Her dissertation, on which this article is based,
was nominated for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize of the American
Studies Association. She’d enjoy hearing from you at koppelmn@
evergreen.edu.